Increasing prospect list hit rate

January 15, 2018

Bankers are always searching for a sure fire way to build a better prospect list. Usually, this conversation focus on data sources and tools used to generate screens that eventually become buyers lists.

While data sources are important, there is one way to drastically improve the hit rate of your buyer outreach – carefully vetting and testing emails.

Take a look at a major M&A data provider and you will see results similar to this:

50% contact population rate

40% email accuracy rate

Net net contribution rate of 20%

This means you are only reaching 20% of your total list..nearly guaranteeing that the other 80% never lay eyes on your deal. Most M&A firms do not have time to source, test and/or correct this data by hand leaving most prospect lists with much room for improvement.

This huge opportunity is why we have historically hand tested our prospect names and emails guaranteeing an accuracy rate of over 85%, a near 4x increase over directly exporting a list from most data systems. Regardless of whether we help or you internally develop buyer lists you should consider integrating a hand curation element into your process. While it is tedious and can add cost, the increases to your hit rate are so significant that it is an absolute must.

Here are a few ways to can start validating your buyer lists more effectively:

Use email testing services – while these are not perfect solutions, they can add double digit increases to your email accuracy

Build mirror lists in more than one system and de-dupe them

Go old school and build your list by hand. An accurate list of 100 is better than a list of 300 with only a 20% accuracy rate

Hire us! We test all email contact as part of our standard prospect list building projects

Regardless of how your validate your buyer list contact information, this is almost always the most measurable opportunity to improve prospect hit rate.

To learn more about how we help middle market M&A firms source buyers and build prospect lists check out our M&A projects page here.